Both officers were suspended that evening. Both were dismissed in the March.
The one whose camera was off was also charged, because switching it off during a stop is a separate offence in that state, and because it turned out he had done it on nine of the previous fourteen dates.
All fourteen complaints were reopened.
Victoria rang every one of those women herself.
One of them cried for most of the call. One of them said she had moved house to get off that road. One of them had stopped driving altogether and had not told anybody why, including her husband.
Several of them are now part of a civil action against the county, and it is still going.
And now the part that people argue about, and it is a real argument.
Victoria could have ended that stop in the first ten seconds.
The credential was in her pocket the whole time. She could have shown it at the window. Nobody would ever have touched her.
She chose not to. She let two men take her out of a car and push her against it and put her in handcuffs, because she needed them to do on camera exactly what fourteen women said they had done off it.
She asked fair questions. She never raised her voice. She did nothing those fourteen women had not done.
But she knew what was coming, and she let it come.
Half the people who hear this say that is the only way it was ever going to be proved, and that eleven months of closed complaints is what happens when you wait for footage that is never switched on.
The other half say she walked into it on purpose, and that a stop you set up is not the same thing as a stop that happens to you — and that the next officer accused this way will point at her and say so.
She has heard both. She was asked at the hearing whether she had provoked them.
She said: “I asked for a reason and a name. If that is provocation, then all fourteen of them provoked it too.”
She still drives that road. Not for work. It is the quickest way home.
